Baldur's Gate 3 has taken home Game of the Year at this year's New York Video Game Critics Circle 2024 New York Game Awards, as well as an award for Best Writing.
12.01.2024 - 08:47 / pcgamer.com / Saga Anderson / Alan Wake
What is it? A surreal survival horror sequel that also ties into Control and Remedy's other past games.
Release date 27 October 2023
Expect to pay $50/£40
Developer Remedy Entertainment
Publisher Epic Games Publishing
Reviewed on Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM
Steam Deck N/A
Link Official site
In the first playable moments of Alan Wake 2, you control a naked, balding, middle-aged man stumbling in confusion around a forest. After a few seconds of staring at his hairy bottom while I guided him around, it dawned on me that this wasn't going to be your typical big budget videogame.
Even by Remedy's own quirky standards, Alan Wake 2 is idiosyncratic. You could call it self-indulgent, even, as it dives headfirst into its every strange idea. Weaving a winkingly meta journey through all corners of the studio's lore, at times it feels like watching Remedy get high off its own fumes.
Which is exactly what makes it so enthrallingly brilliant.
The game picks up 13 years after writer Alan Wake's disappearance at the end of the first game, following both his continuing attempts to escape the mysterious Dark Place—a dimension of psychological nightmare—and the investigations of new protagonist Saga Anderson, an FBI agent sent to the sleepy town of Bright Falls to find the culprits behind a series of ritual murders. You play as both characters, each following their own story threads that parallel and interweave with each other, and you can switch between them at set points, allowing you to experience the two journeys in your own unique order.
Though the story continues almost uninterrupted from the first game, tonally things feel very different in Bright Falls. Alan Wake was the sort of game I'd call spooky rather than scary; Alan Wake 2 is proper survival horror, full of brutal encounters, nail-bitingly tense delves into darkness, and surprisingly gory violence. For both Saga in the real world and Alan in the Dark Place, staying alive means managing your ammo and resources, and carefully deploying sources of light to keep the monstrous Taken at bay and burn away their shadowy defences.
Remedy's last game Control was a chaotic power fantasy, every fight a maelstrom of gunfire, superpowers, and any physics objects that dared to exist in your vicinity. By contrast, Alan Wake 2 is a game of tension and release; long stretches of quiet, building fear, punctuated by short bursts of violence and panic. Brilliantly impactful, satisfying gunplay helps that structure sing—when you hit a Taken's weak spot, you really know about it, as the booming shot rings out, smoky shadows blast out of the wound, and the creature recoils back. That is, until it shrugs off having half its torso blasted away and starts
Baldur's Gate 3 has taken home Game of the Year at this year's New York Video Game Critics Circle 2024 New York Game Awards, as well as an award for Best Writing.
Yesterday, the New York Videogame Critics Circle (NYVGCC) announced the winners of the 13th annual New York Game Awards in a dedicated ceremony streamed live from the SVA Theatre, with Baldur's Gate 3 once again emerging as the big winner.
Remedy Entertainment's creative director Sam Lake has teased what fans can expect from Alan Wake 2's upcoming (downloadable content) DLC in regards to its ties to Control 2.
Alan Wake is coming to Dead by Daylight at the end of this month, the tortured writer set to be the latest survivor in the long-running multiplayer horror game, but how did this come to be and what will Alan play like?
Earlier this month, Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive made the exciting announcement that Alan Wake is being added to the game as a playable Survivor on January 30. His addition immediately has us all asking if any playable Killers from the Alan Wake series could be added in the future too, but Scratch has been taken off the table as he's "too close" to The Entity.
Dead by Daylight, the multiplayer survival horror released back in 2016, has had some eclectic crossovers in its eight years. From Chucky, to Halloween's Laurie Strode, to Nicolas Cage, it's giving Fortnite a run for its money.
You could say that Alan Wake 2 was decades in the making. Last year’s blockbuster from Remedy saw the studio return to its roots and the horrors therein, dredging up the past to loop into something new, now. But it wasn’t just the main character or gameplay style we saw return, but the sounds and inspirations of the original Alan Wake too, bubbling up from Cauldron Lake through the music of Poe.
The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) has announced the nominations for the 27th annual DICE Awards, revealing that Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has garnered the most nominations (9) ahead of Alan Wake 2 (8) and Baldur's Gate 3 (7). Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Character (for Miles Morales), Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design, Outstanding Technical Achievement, Action Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, and Game of the Year. Alan Wake 2 was listed in the Art, Character (for Saga Anderson), Music Composition, Audio Design, Story, Technical Achievement, Adventure, and Game of the Year categories. Baldur's Gate 3 is running in the Character (for Astarion and Karlach), Story, RPG, Game Design, Game Director, and Game of the Year awards.
The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences has announced the nominees for next month’s 27th annual DICE Awards.
Asymmetric horror game Dead by Daylight has added Alan Wake, the protagonist of Remedy Entertainment’s series of the same name, to its roster.
Not content with his starring turns in Fortnite last year, everyone's favourite monologuing horror writer Alan Wake is preparing for another multiplayer crossover, this time making the jump to Behaviour Interative's asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight on 30th January.
Developer Behaviour Interactive is teaming up with Remedy to bring Alan Wake to asymmetrical multiplayer title Dead by Daylight. Alan Wake will join the cast of Dead by Daylight‘s Survivors on January 30, and in the mean time, the character is currently playable in the game’s time-limited public test build on Steam right now. Check out the trailer for Alan Wake in Dead by Daylight below.